Description

After Axel Stone, Blaze Fielding and Adam Hunter destroyed the evil Syndicate leader, Mr. X, the city became a peaceful place to live, and each one of them followed their own paths. One year later, after their reunion, Adam's brother Sammy returned from school to find their apartment in a mess, and Adam nowhere to be seen, and after calling his two friends, one of them notices a photo of Adam chained to a wall, next to someone they knew very well - Mr. X, who returned to turn the peaceful city once again into a war zone. Now, Axel, Blaze, Sammy, and Axel's good friend Max, a pro wrestler, must head out to stop Mr. X once again...hopefully for good...

Streets of Rage 2 differs from the previous title in several ways. There are changes in both graphics (characters now are bigger, more detailed and with more animation frames, and scenarios are less grainy) and gameplay (the rocket move was replaced by a special move that doubles in offense and defense along several new moves), along other new features such as life bars (and names) for all enemies and the radically different new characters.

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Trivia

Cut fighting moves

In early beta versions of Streets of Rage 2, Axel had two very different (and familiar) attacks: a move VERY similar to a Shotokan Dragon Punch, and...a Shotokan Hurricane Kick?

Looks like Sega axed them for good reason: legal action from Capcom for unauthorized teachings of Shotokan moves to their characters. (Shotokan, by the way, is the fighting technique Ryu, Ken, and Akuma use in Capcom's Street Fighter series).

MC.K

In Stage 1, there is an enemy called MC.K who only appears once in the entire game. He is worth about 10,000 points, much more than any other non-boss character.

Music

Yuzo Koshiro claims to have been influenced by early 90's European club music while producing the soundtrack for SoR 2. This is mostly visible with the music in the first part of level 4, which bears an uncanny resemblance with the dance hit Move Any Mountain by The Shamen, released two years before.

References

Two fat thugs in the game are called Talk and Wanter. They're named after Talk Uchimura (Planning & System design) and Wanta (Project management).

Before the Round 4 Stadium, you can see a sign that says "It's like Boo!". This may be a reference to "Fat Boo" from Dragonball Z, which looks an awful lot like the SoR2 character Big Ben.

The character Skate resembles DJ Boy (from the game DJ Boy, another side-scrolling beat-em-up game). This arcade game developed by Kaneko was later published by Sega on the megadrive. In fact, Sega changed the name of the character from 'Sammy' in Bare Knuckle 2 (Japanese release) into Skate in Streets of Rage 2 (US release) and the US publisher for the Megadrive conversion of DJ Boy was the company "Sammy".

It's no coincidence that the fat enemies in the game often go by the name of 'Heart'. It's a reference to the popular manga Fist of the North Star (Hokuto No Ken), which featured an extremely overweight martial artist also called Heart.

Version differences

Sammy "Skate" Hunter was renamed to Eddie "Skate" Hunter in the U.S. and European versions of the game.